Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Ph.D. and Rufus Choate

Today's frustrated historical reconstructionist is -- surprise -- Tom Woods. In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I've posted excerts of his pithy remarks and my "mean and nasty" responses.

WOODS: "Thomas E Woods" brings up your blog and the entry on Blosser's site. I didn't bookmark it because I don't visit it much, because I already have a zillion bookmarks it takes 10 minutes to scroll through, and because I didn't realize I'd need to go back. Hello?”

Yes, Dr. Woods, if your bookmarks are unorganized and left in a shambles, it will take ten minutes to go through your zillion bookmarks. So if you in a hurry, you could search through the 7,571 posts the blog search returns for Thomas E. Woods. Going a page at a time, with ten to a page, is a much more efficient use of a Ph.D. than any other method you could have used to find the conversation you lost.

Not to mention there are other ways to keep informed such as automated notices via email of responses in threads.

WOODS: “[Y]ou oppose secession and believe in an unbreakable Union.”

Currently, there are no issues of ‘union’ or ‘succession’ for me to oppose or support. Just as I have no passions for dead men, I have no passions for dead issues.

WOODS: “And your weird quotations about him are from his political enemies.”

No, I used a single source. One that comes up at the library. I wrongly assumed you would know the specific source. I guess I overestimated your knowledge of 19th century history.

WOODS: “Why not find out what Daniel Webster or John C. Calhoun -- ideological opponents who nevertheless agreed Choate was an important thinker -- thought of him?”

No, I’d rather read Brown, “Life of Rufus Choate,” Neilson, “Memories of Rufus Choate,” Whipple, “Recollections of Eminent Men,” or Fuess, “Rufus Choate.” I’m sure a Ph.D. would agree that reading a variety of biographers would give a broad or even handed portrait of the pro-slaver, Rufus Choate. "His style is peculiar and characteristic, but hardly a model for imitation."

WOODS: “My work stands or falls on its merits.”

And, that is how is should be, Dr. Woods. But, if your ‘work’ targets a specific audience, has a catchy title … like … I don’t know… maybe… “The Politically Incorrect Guide” to something, you retain a publishing agent, get a few endorsements from talk radio hosts to your target audience, have your agent take a few reviewers to a nice business dinner or two… Well, you might do very well at selling ‘works.’ I believe ‘marketing’ is an acceptable study in college and no longer socially frowned upon as it once was.

WOODS: “I'm pursuing this because it's fun and you're so easily excitable.”

Is that what you told Jon Swift at http://jonswift.blogspot.com/? Seems I’m not the first excitable male friend you've made online. And, not the first time someone has found your ‘work,’ your manner, and your demeanor offensive.

See http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/01/politically-incorrect-guide-to.html for blogs and comments.

Announcing the New and Improved Product!

Oh well, back to the first pages of the first chapter.

Page 9

In true Madison Avenue form, the FairTax is announced as “a new method [of taxation] that will send the American economy into warp drive.”

What a crock full of puffery! An economy on warp drive? Isn’t that also called runaway inflation? Might be. If a warp drive economy is so desirable, if it exists at all in a positive form, why does the Federal Reserve target economic growth rates in single digits? If Alan Greenspan believes in keeping economic growth rates in check, maybe an imaginary warp drive engine (also called a sales tax) is a bad thing.

And, if the Federal Reserve is manipulating money supplies and interest rates to control economic growth, how can taxes be the key to economic freedom?

Sort of makes you wonder who’s driving the boat for the FairTax group?

Page 10

Bozo et al aggressively restate what others have said about taxation. A much better (and humorous) description of taxation involves plucking a live goose. Taxation is the art of plucking the goose without having it honk in constant pain.

Speaking of pain, it just hurts when the author or authors portray patriots as being gullible. But, since the FairTax posse hates elected officials, public servants, and the so-called free-spending political class in the world's greatest democracy, I guess they hate the gullible patriots just to keep their fairness issue going.

I’m curious, but not enough to ask any of the rabid IRS haters, when the US was at war with Britain in 1812 –1814 (or a far more modern, far more expensive and far longer war on say – Terrorism) … and enacted higher taxes for the gullible patriots, how would the FairTaxers have paid for the war? Are we to believe retail sales increase during uncertain times like war?

Back on page 11 again

I’ve covered that wonderful aspect of Union bashing needlessly inserted and arguably inaccurate on page 11. But, tracing the income tax back to the Northern War of Aggression by the evil Union and its “political class?” That just wasn’t enough. The idea migrated from the North to the South. Since the book calls the dream of a permanent income tax a snake, I’m okay calling that a migration. Unless of course, it’s a Biblical snake. I think those have to be transplanted by evil people.

Page 12
As they say on the street, it just doesn’t get any better than this! Waahoo! Did the second term of Grover Cleveland cause the Panic of 1893? Oh, I hope that is not the premise being offered! But, Bozo and Lintel ignore the twenty years of decline starting in 1873. As Heilbroner describes it, “lagging growth set off an irregular twenty year decline, at the end of which prices had fallen by two-thirds and the business failure rate had approximately doubled. Looking over the wreckage in 1893, Bradstreet judged the crisis to have been the worst in eighty years (Heilbroner, 163, The Logic of Capitalist Development. Also see Hoffman, 1956, “The Depression of the ‘90’s” Journal of Economic History).

As much fun as it might be to reference a well know board game, like Monopoly and the Reading railroad, which the FairTaxers did, I don’t judge the average person to be that stupid or gullible.

If Grover Cleveland had nothing to do with the economic downturn that started in 1873, why mention him? An imaginative story needs an evil villain so why not blame the President? Bozo and Lintel, by using a very abbreviated and selective history get to ignore economic cycles and causation.

In trying to motivate the reader to hate the IRS, the Federal government, and the current tax system, the needed background information has to be dropped. No point in analyzing anything not relevant to the sales pitch.

Well done, Madison Avenue.

Historical Reconstruction

Gosh, doc. I had no idea!

With your wonderful memory, advanced degrees, and the best technology in the world, you couldn’t remember where you left your comments? You couldn’t find Blosser’s blog? Is that like forgetting whom you’re talking to? What search terms were you using to find little ol' me? Since your sign-in is Tom Woods and Tom Woods does not appear anywhere on my blog title or any post title, I just find your story incredulous.

I’d suggest having a 13 year old show you have to use the bookmarks feature on your browser. Or, the old-fashioned pencil and paper. It will keep you on task.

So I know “nothing” about nineteenth-century American history?

Your emotions clearly cloud your reason.

I demonstrated that I knew Choate was a Whig, died before succession, died before the attacks on federal forts –like Fort Sumter, and was never faced with making an active choice between the a “Union” or the Confederate States of America during his lifetime.

Why would I “of all people like Choate?” You presume to know me!

WOW! I need to get me one of these Ph.D. things if it will let me know what’s inside people, especially complete strangers who have weblogs.

Yeah, I’m just kidding with you. I know a Ph.D. didn’t make you jump to conclusions about who I should be in life. Or, how history should remember the drug addicted Whig, Rufus Choate.

As for being 33 and a scholar, if the cosmic accident of your birth had physically taken place on the East Coast of Africa, you could brag more about your remarkable survival to age 33 and look forward to the real pleasures of human life -- growing old.

To continue the line of “reasoning” used by Neal Bozo et al, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t teach community college.”

Good luck with your historical reconstruction of the Southern oligarchy.

But, remember! If a pack of dogs hike their rear legs to piss on a tree, it's still just a tree --not a water closet.

Fairness

A Tom Woods responded to my blog.

In all fairness, his comments rate a blog.

Tom Woods:

To the point of your comments:

Why should I like Rufus Choate? Mr. Choate is dead and dead many years. Unlike others, I have no passions towards the dead. His death on July 13, 1859 precluded his joining either a “Union” or the Confederate States of America. There is no reading the mind of dead men and declaring them to be for or against a thing that did not exist during their lifetime.

As to the use of nut or crazy to describe anyone with a professional reputation and a Ph.D. browsing an unlinked, unadvertised blogspot at 1:38 am … Well, the words obsessed and paranoid come to mind. Perhaps, you have been conditioned by events to defend your reputation in such obscure venues.

As to the praise you’ve received, I hope it was not condemnation by weak praise but genuine academic praise which will result in your 2004 book someday being used as a history text in a small community college.

Racism in the Modern South, Page 11

So let’s answer one question I’ve raised. Why do Bozo and Lintel hate the federal government?

Pretty easy to understand that when you read the book, especially the first footnote which appears on page 11. Oddly enough, page 11 is the second full page of text in the first chapter.

Mr. Bozo and Lintel hate the Union. I said that exactly right. They don’t acknowledge the federal government as the lawful government of the southern states. The American Civil War was a misnomer. It was the War of Northern Aggression.

Just typical historical revisionism for a couple of good old boys with white sheets.

To defend these assertions, before the cursorily protests from the brave sons of the Confederacy, why does an elected official, Congressman John Linder, use any space in a book on taxation to cover a dispute over a inhuman form of slavery and economics?

Footnote 1 reads in part, “Strictly speaking, there never was an American Civil War. A civil war is a conflict in which two or more factions fight for control of a nation’s government.” This quote is attributed to a Thomas E. Woods, Ph.D. Dr. Woods is a nut case determined to revive the South, complete with all the trimmings. He’s a founding member of the League of the South, devoted to the Whig, Rufus Choate, and an associate scholar of the Abbeville Institute. The Abbeville Institute is harmless enough in it’s desire, “namely to explore the metaphysical image of things human and divine to which the Southern tradition bears witness.”

Myself, I’d never call human slavery divine.

The American Civil War did determine the future government of the United States. It was properly named a civil war in that there were two or more factions, self-aware, with organizational capacity to plan and execute military actions in support of political goals.

Do we understand why these two men from Georgia want to do away with the federal government and the IRS?

The Book Arrives!

Ah the wonders of the complex modern world!

Big Brown, also known as UPS, tossed a box on my doorstep, almost. The shipping box containing the “The FairTax Book” arrived closer to my garage doors than my front door. Before I could stop the driver, he was gone without a signature.

Gratefully, there is no evidence I ever received that 172 pages of brilliant buggery. The market economy thrives on efficiency. That’s why residential deliveries are completed without a legal signature.

Since there will never be positive legal proof I have the book, am I bound by the legal warnings in it?

“All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.”

Loopholes, you’ve got to love them. I will be critical.

So, if anyone liked the book, they can or can’t quote the material? I’m not real clear on this.

But I don’t really care.

I really didn’t want to buy a new book. Bozo and Lintel have enough money from royalty. Clearly, they have royally screwed anyone paying full price. A used copy of the book sells for more than a new one. That’s a sure sign people want their money back. The book stinks so much, even the publisher is discounting the book.

So, in this world of market economics, where UPS can’t be bothered to prove delivery, only critical writers can quote trashy prose, and less than 200 pages can explain market fundamentalism, I am now armed to do battle against … the IRS?

How patriotic of the Congressman and the Con-man to pick on our government.

So why does Bozo and Lintel hate law enforcement, at least in the form of the IRS?

By the way, when Karl Marx explained 18th century capitalism, it took four volumes and over 2,500 pages. But, he didn't have any book signings either.

True Talk on Tax

What opening line would be best in a blog about taxes?

A Mark Twain quip about the certainty of death and taxes?

Something less humorous but still on the point that someone has to pay for government?

I’d rather ground the discussion in reality and let Milton Friedman rage that I’ve stolen something from him.

“There is no free tax.”

Poor Milton just loved to say there is no free lunch. But, I’m not just stealing his line. A free tax implies that a taxpayer gets as much back as they pay.

And, there is no free tax.

We do not go down to the government store and make selections off the shelf. “I’ll take some national defense, death penalty for murderers, and no toll roads.”

The busy taxpayer, if not too busy to notice the final bill, seldom notices the services of government. My favorite example is any form of currency. Use the ATM, write a check, or use a debit/credit card and the government makes that transaction possible by creating and maintaining a stable currency in a real time world.

The many aberrations of the dollar gets defended by the government even when our citizens attack. That should be a Fox Reality Show. When Citizens Attack!

Just another diversion before we get into serious talk about taxes.

Fairness lacks an objective meaning. Somewhere we could find a dozen theories on justice and present relative meanings of fairness within those systems. We’re just not going there.

We are doing something even harder than abstract discussion.

We’re looking for fairness in the reality of a 21st century United States.

Can it be done?